Author: Alex

A new report by the Deep South Challenge: Changing with our Climate, explores what we need to know now, in order to adapt to the drought conditions likely under future climate change.

Drought already impacts a wide range of activities in Aotearoa, including urban water, primary production and electricity generation. It also has significant cultural impacts across communities. Treasury estimated recently that droughts rank number one for climate change-related costs.

Although New Zealand has historically been “water-rich”, the Drought and Climate Change Adaptation: Impacts and Projections report suggests that New Zealand is not well-prepared to cope with a future involving more drought in some areas. Future drought may well have the single most significant future impact on the New Zealand economy.

The report takes a people-centred view of the impacts of droughts and identifies several top priority research questions, one of which has already developed into a research project led by Wageed Kamish from Tonkin + Taylor.

The project seeks to understand the future of drought for New Zealand as our climate changes. It’s a big task, but one Kamish thinks it is achievable: “We acknowledge that one project may not provide all of the answers. However, by adopting a simpler methodology, we’ll have wider spatial coverage, while still being able to quantify the risk-of-failure of water supply systems in New Zealand. NIWA, our project partner, has already completed a considerable amount of work on climate change projections and these will provide a good platform from which to start.”

“Although it is true,” Kamish continues, “that farmers and rural communities normally experience the full effects of a drought, we don’t have to look much further than the recent Day Zero scenario in Cape Town (South Africa) to realise that urban areas can also be affected by droughts.” He says, “As climate changes into the future, water supply systems will have to be adapted accordingly, which may include new sources, new technologies, increased storage capacity and better management of water usage. In parallel, we need to carefully manage the quality of existing and potential sources now, so as not to jeopardise them for future use.  The primary key to this is that we adapt our water systems well enough in advance to avoid a Day Zero scenario. Adaptation may take several years, so in many cases the planning process needs to start right now.”

The project will also work closely with stakeholders, particularly regional councils. Kamish explains: “Having an appropriately constituted stakeholder reference group will also help to produce useful outcomes for regional councils, who will benefit the most from this research.”

The Drought and Climate Change Adaptation: Impacts and Projections report was produced as a result of a Deep South Dialogue, run by Motu Economic and Public Policy Research. The Dialogue brought together key researchers and sector representatives to map current knowledge about how drought will impact New Zealand as our climate changes, and to identify critical knowledge gaps that must be filled if we are to successfully adapt to our changing climate.

For example, the report suggests we need to better understand the likely incidence of multi-regional drought, and the likely nationwide changes in drought incidence. It suggests we need to explore how future droughts, in the context of a changing climate, might affect future water supply and demand (particularly for the local food production sector, which competes for water with other users).

The report states we need to know more about New Zealand’s level of risk in relation to drinking water availability (both in urban and rural areas), as well as about the impact of drought on vulnerable communities (for example, how drought might affect labour patterns or impact residential house prices or land values). It suggests we need more research into how changing drought patterns might affect energy production and consumption.

The report is now available to read on the Motu website.

Check out some media coverage of this report:

• New Zealand is unprepared for more frequent drought, Stuff NZ
• Report: Climate change already a global health emergency, NZ Herald
• Drought under climate change: What Kiwis need to know now, NZ Herald

The Deep South Challenge is proud to share our Future Strategy for 2019–2024. This strategy builds on our first five years of research (2014–2019) and incorporates input from researchers, partners, stakeholders and advisory groups. 

To coincide with the announcement about continued National Science Challenge funding, by Minister Megan Woods, we are very pleased to publicly release our future research strategy.

At this page of our website, we invite you to:

• Take a visual tour of our Future Strategy, as illustrated in our new Challenge infographic
• Download the infographic as a poster (soon to be available in printed form)
• Watch a video of our online webinar in which the Challenge Director and Science Leadership Team outlined our future research themes and key partner and stakeholder communities
• Read a summary of the strategy and access the full strategy, in PDF form
• Take note of the overall process and timeline for commissioning research 
• Find answers to FAQs – mainly from the research community – about our Future Strategy.

New Zealand is projected to warm by 1-4°C during the 21st century. This warming will melt our frozen water resources – our snow, ice and glaciers. However, the scale and timing of changes to our meltwater aren’t clear. We need improved water projections for the development of robust climate adaptation policy. With Andrew Mackintosh (Victoria University of Wellington) and Jono Conway (Bodeker Scientific).

New Zealand is projected to warm by 1-4°C during the 21st century. This warming will melt our frozen water resources – our snow, ice and glaciers. However, the scale and timing of this melt is not clear. 

Mountain rivers in both the North and South Islands of New Zealand feed our largest hydro-electric power schemes, and provide critical water for irrigation, especially during drought. Melting snow and ice may also cause increased flooding.

The aim of this research project, affectionately nicknamed “The Icey Project,” is to make projections about how runoff from New Zealand’s glaciers and seasonal snow will change into the future. The research team is also engaging with iwi, industry representatives and local authorities to determine the specific needs of communities that use water. This data is crucial for decision makers in government, communities and industry. This research project brings together, for the first time, New Zealand’s leading snow and glacier scientists (read about the full research team at our website, here). Professor Andrew Mackintosh’s research focuses on understanding how glaciers and ice sheets behave and interact with the global climate system, using a physics-based approach. He leads the Glacier Research Group at the Antarctic Research Centre.

Physical hubs: 

• NIWA Wellington: Conference Room
• NIWA Christchurch: Terra Nova Room
• Victoria University of  Wellington: Room MYLT 101
• University of Canterbury: Kauri Room, Puaka James Hight Building
• University of Otago: Room 229 Science III Building

Please note, all visitors to NIWA must sign in on arrival.

We encourage you to set up your own hub and bring friends and colleagues together to participate in the seminar. Please let us know if you do set up your own hub.

Email: [email protected]

A pre-conference workshop at the 8th Biennniel International Indigenous Research Conference: Innovating Mātauranga in the National Science Challenges: Collaborating in and Across National Science Challenges through kaupapa Māori research programmes.

Sponsored by the National Science Challenges, this workshop will provide an opportunity to hear from kaupapa Māori researchers across the NSCs, and to explore the potential for collaboration between NSCs.

This event will be chaired by Jessica Hutchings from Building Better Homes Towns and Cities (BBHTC).

Today, each of the eleven National Science Challenges learned we have been successful in securing funding for a further five years of research. The Deep South Challenge: Changing with our Climate successfully bid for $27.1M, ensuring we can deliver on our mission of supporting New Zealanders to anticipate, adapt, manage risk and thrive in a changing climate.

In a statement today, Minister Woods said, “I’m delighted to see that the Challenges are fundamentally changing the culture of how science is being undertaken in New Zealand. The Challenges bring our top scientists and researchers together to work collaboratively, to work across disciplines, and to co-develop science with a broad range of stakeholders and Māori – something that we are truly leading the world in.” 

Responding to the news, Challenge Director Mike Williams said, “While we were confident of being funded again, this announcement is of course something to be celebrated. We have made so much progress in our first five years, and have established strong relationships across the public and private sectors, and with Māori communities. Our research is delivering the data and solutions our key communities need to begin making decisions about how they might adapt to climate change. 

“We particularly want to congratulate our researchers,” Mike said, “whose work has been recognised for its high quality and ambitious reach in supporting New Zealand to prepare for the future ahead of us. MBIE particularly highlighted the success of our Vision Mātauranga projects and noted our Challenge-wide engagement efforts, ‘which appear inclusive and courageous in the sense that they allow the Challenge to open and sustain potentially difficult societal conversations.'”

We extend our thanks to our Governing Board, our Independent Science Panel and our Kāhui Māori, who have worked hard behind the scenes to ensure the Deep South Challenge continues to maximise our potential within a tightly focussed work programme. We’re also pleased to be able to share our comprehensive Future Strategy for our second phase of research (July 2019–June 2024). To coincide with this announcement, we’re publicly launching our comprehensive Future Strategy, which sets out our research pathway for the next five years.

Current research suggests that climate change is likely to have significant impacts on New Zealand’s tourism sector, an important and valuable industry for New Zealand.

How can people involved in tourism manage risks to the sector? What steps should the government and the tourism sector take to respond and adapt to climate change threats?

As part of a Deep South Challenge research project Culture and Climate Change, a team of University of Waikato researchers is organising a citizen panel, bringing together climate scientists, social scientists and policy makers, along with those at the frontlines of the tourism industry. Together, we will be crafting an action plan for climate change adaptation in the tourism sector.

If you have an interest in managing risk in New Zealand’s tourism industry, we invite you to participate. You will be helping to shape policies that balance economic and environmental interests and supporting our tourism sector to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

Places are limited. Registration essential: please register early to avoid disappointment. 

Email the Citizen Panel administrator: [email protected].
Check out the project at: www.deepsouthchallenge.co.nz/projects/culture-climate-change

This is a free event with morning tea and lunch provided.

Snow is the perfect place to store water over winter before nature releases it over spring and summer, in time for the irrigation season. The seasonal snow storage acts as an uncontrolled reservoir with the natural release of water into streams aligning well with the needs of growing plants.

There are many places throughout the South Island of New Zealand where snow melt is thought to be a significant contributor to stream flows that feed into irrigation systems. Central Otago is the obvious, stand-out region, with the Manuherikia schemes being classic examples that rely on the snow reservoir to support their human-made reservoirs. Areas outside of Otago also need the snow. For example, in South Canterbury the Opuha Water Ltd scheme keeps a very close eye on snow in the Two Thumb range, to plan each season’s water management. Of course, as well as many of these large schemes, a myriad of irrigation water takes operate from streams that are snow-melt fed. And on a completely different scale, the big alpine rivers of the South Island are all influenced to a greater or lesser degree by snow melt.

The magnitude of the “snow melt effect” – the delayed release of water stored as snow – varies considerably from place to place, and most irrigators and water managers have a view on its importance to their own operation. There are two things people are in agreement of: 1) the amount of snow stored in the mountain reservoirs varies considerably from year to year, and 2) the amount of snow is probably reducing over the long term, as the climate gets warmer.

In recognition of the need to better understand the annual variation, and long-term change, the Deep South Challenge has funded a group of people from an array of agencies to improve our ability to quantify New Zealand’s frozen reservoirs, and to assess how snow will fare into the future. The project is called “Snow, ice and glaciers in our changing climate: The impact of climate change on New Zealand’s frozen water resources”, known more affectionately among the team as the Icey Project.

Past consideration of climate change has found that the seasonal snow reservoirs will reduce in size and will release their water earlier than traditionally experienced. This is a double blow for irrigators. Less water, made available too early. In catchments with large glaciers upstream, there may be a temporary increase in runoff during spring and summer due increased glacier melt. However, increased glacier melt over some decades will eventually reduce the size of the glaciers and summer runoff will decrease.

Of course, with timely warning, these effects may be offset with changes in management systems, crop types, and irrigation infrastructure. But change is stressful, and often expensive, so clarity on the magnitude and timing of the changes to the frozen reservoirs is imperative to plan the required changes appropriately. Limiting the uncertainty in knowledge of the future snow reservoir is exactly what the Icey Project has been tasked to do. By the end of the project (June 2019), Icey will have made a new assessment of how the snow and ice reservoirs throughout New Zealand are likely to change between now and the end of the century.

Nevertheless, some challenges will remain and certain questions will be unanswered. For example, we still don’t know the extent to which our snow is redistributed by wind and avalanches, or at what rate our glaciers are melting when they’re blanketed in a thick surface debris cover. In subsequent work, we hope to further develop the science and integrate this new knowledge into national-scale hydrological assessments. Ultimately, this will provide a sound basis for irrigators to determine the best approach to plan for the future, and reduce the stress both on water managers, and on their crops.

A likely spin-off for irrigators is that the Icey Project may enable measurement-driven computer simulations to provide regular and up-to-the-minute assessments of how much water is ready, poised to flow into their systems. Similar assessments have been applied to the hydro-electricity industry since 1995, after prompting by the 1992 energy crisis, and more recently, to the Opuha catchment in South Canterbury.

Photo credit: Brewster Glacier during summer, which is located near Haast Pass in the Southern Alps (Chris Garden).

This article was originally written for the Spring 2018 edition of the Irrigation NZ magazine. The full article looks at a range of climate impacts on the irrigation sector.

This article was written jointly by Tim Kerr (Aqualinc Research); Andrew Mackintosh, Ruzica Dadic, Huw Horgan, Brian Anderson (Victoria University of Wellington); Nicolas Cullen, Pascal Sirguey (University of Otago); Jono Conway (Bodeker Scientific); Heather Purdie (University of Canterbury); and Christian Zammit (NIWA).

E ora ana te mauri o Patutātahi me te awa o Rangitāiki, e manaakitia ana e te iwi, e tiakina ana mo ngā whakatipuranga o muri mai. | To ensure that Rangitāiki River remains part of tomorrow’s plan, the vision demands attention by our people today. – Rangitāiki River Forum

Tēnā koutou. I am a descendant of Ngāti Awa, Te Pahipoto, and I’ve resided in Edgecumbe for 30 years. I grew up in Te Teko on our ancestral whenua, just out of Edgecumbe. Nanny Pareake and Koro Eruera had planted what seemed like an enormous and abundant orchard along the Rangitāiki River, immediately behind their home. Willow trees hung low over the waterway and served as excellent platforms for jumping off and floating away from. Summertime was spent with my siblings and cousins eating fruit and swimming. I was a water rat. At that time, many of us were. I loved the river then and I still do.

On April 6, 2017, at 8.15am, residents along College Road in Edgecumbe were asked to evacuate. After two days of heavy rain the river level was high and there were serious concerns about flooding. Fifteen minutes later, the Rangitāiki stop bank breached. Water quickly traversed the land, entering up to 580 households. The entire township was evacuated.

My husband, his business, our two tamariki, our mokopuna and many of our close friends and their families were directly affected by the flood. Two of our three homes have required rebuilding. Disaster, and the chaos that follows, disrupts lives. How people and their families manage, how their relationships hold up and how they behave collectively as a community, all determine the extent of the aftermath. So it is fitting that my research has focussed on what I term Korowai Manaaki – the Craft of Care.

Several years before my mother died, she gifted me what was to be the one korowai (cloak) she would make. Like our kuia Pareake, who was in her time a master weaver, mum spent many months crafting the garment. She adorned it not only with duck feathers from our hunting friends, but also with patience, thoughtfulness and aroha (love).

I use this korowai as an analogy to describe my research. The korowai encapsulates the wairua, or inner circle, of my key research themes: mana whānau, mana whenua, mana kōrero and mana tautoko. Together these form a coherent, collective research framework.

Through my values-based study, I’m seeking to identify the key understandings that emerge from the practice of manaaki – the craft of care – for displaced whānau, in disaster situations. I want to find out the needs that present for many flood-affected families, who are also often forced to relocate. I am very interested in understanding how climate change impacts on or reshapes the whānau unit.

In terms of my research journey, I hope to continue on to a PhD. I envisage developing creative tools, using communication technologies, social media and virtual reality, to educate communities. I’m also keen to develop an app that will encapsulate my research and be of benefit to whānau affected by disaster. Mauri ora koutou katoa.

Clouds have a massive effect on our climate. Cloud cover reflects radiation from the sun that would otherwise be absorbed by oceans, raising their temperatures. Cloud cover can also act as a blanket, keeping warmth near the surface. With Adrian McDonald (University of Canterbury) and Vidya Varma (NIWA).

Despite their significant influence on climate, clouds still represent the largest source of uncertainty in modern climate models. For example, the frequency of clouds over the Southern Ocean is often underestimated, causing models to predict warmer sea surface temperatures than observed. In turn, this leads models to predict the strength and position of the storm tracks incorrectly. Storm tracks impact New Zealand directly – bringing not only extreme weather events but also contributing to longer-term changes such as drought or changing rainfall patterns.

It is vital to correct the way clouds are represented in our models, so we can increase certainty in our climate projections for New Zealand.

In this seminar, Adrian and Vidya will present their joint work on Clouds and Aerosols. Adrian will discuss his team’s work collecting and analysing physical and satellite observations during recent voyages to the Southern Ocean. Vidya will describe her work in our NZ earth system modelling programme to identify modelling errors (“biases”) and their underlying causes, and to begin to correct them.

About the presenters

Adrian McDonald is the Director of Gateway Antarctica and an Associate Professor in the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences at the University of Canterbury. Adrian is also the leader of our Processes and Observations programme, and is the Principal Investigator of our Clouds & Aerosols and Satellite Simulator projects. Vidya Varma is a NIWA climate scientist working in our Clouds & Aerosols project. The project aims to improve the representation of clouds and aerosols in the NZ earth system model. Vidya’s areas of interest include modelling high-latitude climate variability (from both anthropogenic and natural causes).

We’re pleased to announce that Andrew Tait, principal climate scientist at NIWA, has taken on the role of Impacts and Implications programme lead. In this short interview, we asked Andrew about his vision for the job, and for the broader challenge of climate adaptation in New Zealand.

Tēnā koe Andrew. You bring years of experience, as a principal climate scientist at NIWA, to this role. Can you talk a bit about how your work as a climate scientist has led you to be interested in the question of adaptation?

Over the last two decades I’ve been involved in numerous climate change assessments for New Zealand and in the Pacific. These projects have focussed on producing climate change projections and then considering the implications and modelling the impacts of these climate changes. This has been fascinating work and is fundamental research for building up our collective understanding of what might lie ahead. Of course, this work is ongoing in the Deep South Challenge and I am thrilled to be involved in shaping this research. Adaptation is the ultimate goal of this work, because only through adaptation will we minimise the impacts and continue to prosper.

I see that adapting to climate change is a people problem, as much as or even more than it is a problem for physical science. I’ve worked alongside social scientists for many years and am excited about exploring different parts of the adaptation problem using social science methods and theories.

This moment in time is unique – we’re seeing the conversation about how to slow or stop climate change come alive in the mainstream. We’re still, however, lagging internationally on the issue of climate adaptation. What excites you about the climate impacts and adaptation work happening in the Deep South Challenge?

There is a clear focus on working with end users and stakeholders in the Deep South Challenge, which is a vital component of adaptation. In fact, it is the single most important factor because adaptation options must be tailored to stakeholders’ needs. Working with stakeholders in a research co-development framework is incredibly exciting and I am really looking forward to producing some really useful outputs that are immediately applicable to a wide range of New Zealanders.

As a National Science Challenge, the Deep South Challenge can’t focus on all climate impacts or on all aspects of climate adaptation. What role do you see our Challenge as having in helping to gain traction on such a complex and intractable issue.

The Deep South Challenge is part of a wider research landscape on climate change impacts and adaptation in New Zealand. It is extremely important for the research performed in the Challenge to inform and be informed by this wider effort, including international studies. I agree that the issue is complex, but I don’t think it’s intractable. Together we can build a collective capability to be prepared for the impacts of climate change. If we plan well, together we can and will adapt.

The Deep South Challenge is starting to transition into its second five years of operation. We’re trying to support joined up thinking on climate adaptation, and to fill some critical research gaps. What do you think the Challenge should hope to have achieved at the end of its 10-year mission?

I am fully supportive of the direction the Challenge is going in and I’m grateful to have an opportunity to work with such talented people. Over the remaining years of the Challenge, I want to see demonstrable evidence of people making climate change adaptation plans based on the best available information. I hope even to see some people begin to implement these plans alongside a robust process of monitoring and evaluation. To me, this will represent the ultimate success for the Challenge. But most of all it will mean that New Zealand is well on the way to becoming a climate-resilient nation.